Feral Vision

What does it mean to watch someone else’s watching—especially when that “someone” is an eagle, a cockatoo, a forest of unseen birds, insects, marine creatures, or many nonhuman eyes whose ways of seeing exceed what our own vision, and our cameras, can ever fully capture? Feral Vision gathers works that trouble the stability of testimony by shifting our attention to perception itself: how beings register the world, how those registrations are remembered, translated, and mis-translated, and how moving images metabolize these fragile accounts into something we can almost—but never fully—grasp. What happens when the moving image tries to inhabit that perception by proxy?

In Animal Eye, scientists and philosophers try to decode how animals see, using specialized cameras, spectral ranges, and technical experiments to approximate nonhuman vision. The film keeps us suspended in a speculative zone. Every technical experiment becomes a reminder that we are looking at an apparatus looking at an animal looking at the world—a relay of gazes that never quite settles. Vision here is not a stable viewpoint, but a chain of attempted translations. What Birds Talk About When They Talk turns this impulse into a wry choreography of text. Birdsong remains off-screen and off-language; instead, captions, myths, field notes, and phonetic spellings skitter across the frame. The birds never appear, and yet they organize everything—our knowledge systems, our metaphors, our desire to subtitle what refuses to speak “for” us. Captioning—which usually claims to stabilize meaning—becomes a flickering, unfinished effort to keep pace with sonic life.

Unless the Eye Catch Fire follows the afterimage of another creature: an eagle that falls into a man’s pickup truck in Nova Scotia. Within a week, the man, his dog, and the bird are dead. The film doesn’t solve this coincidence; instead, it diffracts the event through the sister’s recollections, a basement well, and an eagle rehabilitation centre. Testimony here is spatial, atmospheric, unresolved—vision moving through thresholds rather than settling into explanation.

Koki, Ciao closes the program with another impossible witness as a single bird holds court over history: Koki, Josip Broz Tito’s 67-year-old cockatoo—once part of the Non-Aligned Movement’s “animal diplomacy” and now kept in a public zoo—narrates over previously unseen Yugoslav state archives. State officials, Hollywood stars, and parades of dictatorship re-emerge as caged memories refracted through one talking animal: a shaky witness to a regime it could never fully understand, a bird’s-eye is the afterimage of power, whose body still carries the memories of that era.

Across these works, perception is never a single, stable viewpoint. It is a relay: between species, between archive and present, between caption and call. Feral Vision treats cinema as a way of metabolizing other beings’ perceptions—taking in their partial, faltering testimonies and rereleasing them as images that stay productively, insistently unstill.

In this sense, Feral Vision is in conceptual romance with its companion program Unstill Image: Unstill Image looks at the ways political violence and scopic regimes press visuality into fixed images while each work worries those limits from within through rehearsal, distance, withholding, blackout, and re-imagining. Feral Vision takes up this tension at the level of perception itself, letting vision go feral—routed through animal eyes, (mis)translations, and speculative proxies—so that perception returns decentered, broken out of its confines, and irreducibly multiple.